The Twin Dilemma Part Two

The one where the Doctor meets an old friend from the past...

The Doctor's first reaction when somebody points a gun at him is one of self-preservation, demonstrated both when Hugo threatens him in the TARDIS, and when the Jacondans capture him later on. He is aghast that anybody should want to harm him, and shows little compassion for Hugo when he passes out again. Peri expresses pity for Hugo and what he must have been through, and appeals to the Doctor to help him heal, but this new Doctor only thinks of himself and his own preservation.

It's not a good look (and I don't mean just his coat). It's such a mistake to be toying with the Doctor's fundamental character like this, it's dangerous and has the potential to damage the programme's reputation. The Doctor is supposed to be our hero - a fallible hero, I admit, but a hero all the same - someone we can trust in, look up to, and learn from. For all their grumpy spats in previous incarnations, the Doctor has always been a likeable character, but I must admit I'm struggling to warm to this sixth incarnation at all. He's not making it easy.

Nevertheless, the scene between Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant in which the Doctor decides to investigate Titan 3 in search of missing children helps to remind the viewer what we're supposed to be watching - Doctor Who, in which a crazy alien rescues the needy and saves galaxies. And there's an all-too-brief moment of wistfulness when the Doctor remembers a past companion ("Brave heart, Tegan"), and Malcolm Clarke cleverly weaves in his theme from Janet Fielding's leaving scene in Resurrection of the Daleks. I like that; that's nice.

However, when the Doctor claims he can sense there is something wrong, it's not the punch-the-air return to form moment I was hoping for. "There is a sickness in the air," he ponders. "I can feel the vibrations. I cannot yet detect their source, but it is there... The lifeforce itself is in danger of extinction. We must find this evil and destroy it." The way I feel watching The Twin Dilemma, I can't help seeing these words as a running commentary on Doctor Who itself.

The Doctor and Peri leave the unconscious Hugo Lang slumped in a chair in the control room (no comfy pull-down bed from MFI for him) and go searching for the lost children on the blasted surface of Titan 3. The Doctor strides ahead, exuberantly quoting 'Excelsior' by 19th century American poet Henry Longfellow, culminating in a triumphantly OTT exclamation of the title. This guy's truly nuts. I don't know how Peri could feel even remotely safe with this crackpot. This is not eccentricity, it's demented.

The duo find a service duct hatch and make their way along a traditional Doctor Who tunnel until Peri makes the mistake of suggesting their quest might be dangerous, at which point the Doctor's mental state flips once more, from gung-ho curiosity to cowardly reticence. But before they can return to the TARDIS, Noma and Drak find them and hold them at gunpoint. This leads to another embarrassing display from Colin Baker as the Doctor pleads for his life, falling to his knees and begging for mercy as he cowers behind Peri like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon. In a matter of seconds the Doctor manages to display cowardice, dishonesty and deceit, all undesirable traits in a hero figure.

I get that it's "interesting" to show the Doctor in a different light, displaying emotions and traits we're not used to. But surely it's better to explore it in one story, like in The Invasion of Time, rather than in a new Doctor's first, defining adventure? I know the Sixth Doctor doesn't stay cowardly or deceitful, but to do all this in his first story, and then go off air for nine months, is a definite wrong turn. Nine months in which people's only opinion of the new Doctor is based upon a whole bunch of negatives. Not a wise move.

Taken to the safe house, the Doctor meets Professor Edgeworth, who he eventually realises is actually his old pal Azmael, a Time Lord who he knows as a friend and mentor, and "master of Jaconda". It takes a while for Azmael to catch up, but mention of a curiously ambiguous drunken evening by a fountain between he and the Fourth Doctor jogs his memory. I say "curiously ambiguous" because it feels like there's something left unsaid about this encounter. They were drunk, and the way Maurice Denham takes a brief moment to think wistfully back to "that evening by the fountain" suggests there's something more to it than a lads' night out. I dunno, maybe I'm reading far too much in to far too little...

A few brief thoughts:

• Because the twins dared to rig up a distress signal, Azmael bans them using computers to carry out their "symphony of higher mathematics", and instead they're reduced to using marker pens and Perspex boards. It doesn't look anything like maths to me, but more what I imagine block transfer computation would look like in written form...
• "Silence, wretch!" the Doctor says to Noma. Love this bit.
• I think it's odd that Azmael is the "master of Jaconda". Why would a Time Lord - renegade or not - be a master of anywhere? It has rather tyrannical connotations, even if Azmael was a compassionate ruler. The novelisation of this story tells us that Azmael was elected leader by the Jacondans (were there no Jacondan candidates?) before being usurped by the Gastropod Mestor just months later. This suggests the Fourth Doctor's last meeting with Azmael on that drunken evening was during those few months in which Azmael was master.
• Hugo Lang manages to choose the second most appalling and tasteless outfit in the TARDIS wardrobe room (is it made of sweetie wrappers?). This abomination of an outfit just so happens to also be the place Peri hid his gun's power pack. The ineptitude of this plot point confounds me totally.

The Doctor manages to rig up Azmael's revitalising modulator to act as a transmat, and plans to send Peri back 10 seconds in time. "You'll find yourself in the TARDIS," he claims, inexplicably. How will she? Ten seconds earlier she wasn't in the TARDIS at all, she was still where she is now in the safe house. Shouldn't he send her back in time by an hour rather than a few seconds? This makes No Sense Whatsoever.

Zapped back into the TARDIS (somehow), Peri witnesses the destruction of the safe house on the TARDIS scanner, but with no Doctor in sight. This breaks the poor girl, and she begins to cry, Nicola Bryant's face crumpling into a desperately unflattering gurn as the end credits mercifully swarm in.

And I'm only halfway through this living nightmare.

First broadcast: March 23rd, 1984

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Malcolm Clarke using Tegan's leaving scene theme when the Doctor remembers her.
The Bad: Hugo finding the power pack in the one outfit he just happens to put on.
Overall score for episode: ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Word repetition: 2 - In reference to the way Peri describes Azmael's safe house on the surface of Titan 3, the Doctor mocks: "Bump? Bump! Bump?"

NEXT TIME: Part Three...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Three; Part Four

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site.

The Twin Dilemma is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Twin-Dilemma-DVD/dp/B002ATVDEQ